In Spain during the Francoist dictatorship, a girl's father insists that their family will never speak Spanish again in favor of Basque — a small act of political defiance that slowly changes their lives, until they can never go back.

A young woman from Dahomey is stolen during the Dutch colonization. She is separated from her brother and hopes to go on a mission to find him.

A daughter and a mother wonder what the lesson of their story is.

An American writer travels to Sophia where he meets a famous poetess. He falls in love with her and her attitude.

When a man marries a princess from Cimmeria, a country he believes he imagined into existence, he must come to terms with a culture that recognizes twins as a single person—a primary and their shadow—and the lengths a shadow twin would go to in order to become their own person.

An old linguistics researcher is ousted from his university position on the frontier of a small island he acculturated. Upon his return home, he begins to believe that he and his life's work are marginal.

A white American man and a Chinese-American woman visit the woman's family in China. After the woman's cousin compares the woman's Chinese to a toddler's, she stops speaking English and decides she wants to stay in China for awhile before returning, to reconnect with her family and her place of birth. Upon returning to the United States alone, the man, initially disinterested and unmotivated, begins to learn Chinese.

A U.S state department official encounters an infatuation on his trip to Eastern Europe that ends in despair.

A jaded American mercenary searches for the stepdaughter of a Mexican businessman on a remote island. After a bloody showdown with the stepdaughter's kidnappers, the mercenary finds justice and a second chance.

A Portuguese girl in Hong-Kong finds her circumstances suddenly changed with the onset of the Sino-Japanese War, and struggles to find her way out of China despite the ubiquitous presence of the Japanese officers and spiteful former lovers.